Studio portrait of Chaplin, 1910. ALSO BY PETER ACKROYD Fiction The Great Fire of London The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde Hawksmoor Chatterton First Light English Music The House of Doctor Dee Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem Milton in America The Plato Papers The Clerkenwell Tales The Lambs of London The Fall of Troy The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein Three Brothers Nonfiction Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag: The History of an Obsession London: The Biography Albion:The Origins of the English Imagination Venice: Pure City London Under Biography Ezra Pound and His World T. S. Eliot Dickens Blake The Life of Thomas More Shakespeare: The Biography Ackroyd’s Brief Lives Chaucer J.M.W. Turner Newton Poe: A Life Cut Short Poetry Ouch! The Diversions of Purley and Other Poems Criticism Notes for a New Culture The Collection: Journalism, Reviews, Essays, Short Stories, Lectures, edited by Thomas Wright Copyright © 2014 by Peter Ackroyd All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House company. www.nanatalese.com Originally published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, an imprint of the Random House Group Limited, London. DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Random House LLC. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC. Jacket design by Michael Windsor Jacket image: The Circus © Roy Export S.A.S. Scan courtesy Cineteca di Bologna Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ackroyd, Peter, 1949– Charlie Chaplin / Peter Ackroyd. pages cm.— Includes bibliographical references. Pages cm.— ISBN 978-0-385-53737-7 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-38553738-4 (eBook) 1. Chaplin, Charlie, 1889–1977 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States— Biography. 3. Comedians—United States—Biography. I. Title. PN2287.C5A48 2014 791.4302′8092—dc23 [B] 2014013009 v3.1 Contents Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright 1. A London Childhood 2. On Stage 3. Keep It Wistful 4. Making a Living 5. The Rhythm 6. The Eternal Imp 7. Charlee! 8. Mutual Relations 9. The Little Mouse 10. The Ostrich Egg 11. Home Again 12. Why Don’t You Jump? 13. The Edge of Madness 14. The Beauty of Silence 15. The Machine 16. The German Tramp 17. Let Us Work and Fight 18. Proceed with the Butchery 19. No Return 20. The Shadows Bibliography A Note About the Author 1 A London Childhood Welcome to the world of South London in the last decade of the nineteenth century. It was frowsy; it was shabby; the shops were small and generally dirty. It had none of the power or the energy of the more important part of the city on the other side of the Thames. It moved at a slower pace. All the accounts of it, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, describe it as a distinct and alien place. It was in a sense cut off from the life of the greater London; this may account for the air of exhaustion, and of torpor, which could hit the unwary. It was the site of small and noisome trades such as hat-making and leather- tanning. Factories abounded for the manufacture of biscuits, jam and pickles. Glue factories stood adjacent to timber warehouses and slaughterhouses. The predominant smells were those of vinegar, and of dog dung, and of smoke, and of beer, compounded of course by the stink of poverty. By the end of the nineteenth century Kennington, the earliest home of Charles Chaplin, had all the characteristics of a slum. The areas south of the river had for centuries also been the place of somewhat suspect pleasures, such as brothels and pleasure gardens. That tradition was continued in the nineteenth century with the public houses, gin palaces and music halls of the area. One of the first music halls, the Winchester, opened in South London in 1840. The Surrey followed eight years later. Two of the great halls, the Canterbury and Gattis-in-the-Road, were in the vicinity along the Westminster Bridge Road; smaller halls were to be found everywhere. The stars of the music hall would congregate on Sunday mornings at the White Horse, the Queen’s Head, the Horns or the Tankard, public houses which the young Chaplin knew well. The music-hall booking agents were located in Lambeth. Since South London was separated from the rest of the capital, it acquired its own communal atmosphere; the houses and tenements were bursting with people, so the women and children spent much of their time on the streets close to their dwellings. They sat outside on chairs, or leaned from the windowsills. As a result the neighbourhood itself, rather than the individual household, was the true family; wives looked out for each other, and the children played together. One of those children was Charles Chaplin. “They are my people, these cockneys,” he wrote in a magazine article in 1933. “I am one of them.” South London would remain the source and centre of his inspiration. The origins of Charles Chaplin are mysterious. No certificate of his birth has ever been found, and no entry in a baptismal register exists. He once travelled to Somerset House in search of his birth certificate, but there was nothing there. He sought himself here, he sought himself there, but he could not find himself anywhere. He might have come out of nowhere. The place of his birth is equally mysterious. He believed that he had been born in “East Lane,” off the Walworth Road; the narrow thoroughfare is called East Street, but it was locally known as a “Lane” because it boasted a loud and vigorous Sunday morning street market with its costermongers, old-clothes sellers and various hawkers or traders. (“Lane” was the nomenclature generally given to a street market.) He may or may not have first seen the world there. Another difficulty arises. He confided on occasions to his friends that he was not sure of the identity of his biological father; nevertheless he took the name of a successful music-hall artist, Charles Chaplin, who was for a while married to his mother. He once said to an assistant, Eddie Sutherland, that “I don’t know, actually, who my father was.” He may have been, in the phrase of the period, a love child. There is less difficulty about the identity of his mother. Hannah Chaplin gave birth to a boy in the middle of April 1889, at eight o’clock in the evening. An announcement was placed in a music-hall paper, The Magnet, in the following month. “On the 15th, the wife of Mr Charles Chaplin (née Miss Lily Harley) of a beautiful boy. Mother and son both doing well. Papers please copy.” The Magnet was out by a day: Chaplin was born on April 16. Hannah came from a somewhat rackety family, the Hills, many of whose members lived in the immediate vicinity of East Street; toil and poverty had left their mark on some of them, compounded by a streak of madness in the female line. Lily Harley was her stage name. She went on the boards as a singer at the beginning of 1884, and her musical career earned some success before entering a decline. There is no doubt that she met Mr. Chaplin when he found lodgings with the Hill family in Brandon Street, Walworth; she was nineteen years old, and already pregnant, but the baby was not Chaplin’s. The child, Sydney, was said by Hannah herself to be the result of an elopement to South Africa with a rich bookmaker named Sydney Hawkes. Whatever the truth of the matter Charles Chaplin married her in June 1885, and gave the infant his surname. He also gave Hannah’s second son his surname. This child bore his first name, too, but he walked out on Hannah a year after the birth. It must be suspected that the fault was her infidelity. He may have guessed, or suspected, that the infant son was not his. Chaplin later confessed that his mother had enjoyed many affairs; it is also more likely than not that, in moments of distress and poverty, she took to the streets. In My Autobiography Chaplin states that “to gauge the morals of our family by commonplace standards would be as erroneous as putting a thermometer in boiling water.” In his subsequent films he is preoccupied by the role of the prostitute. Hannah Chaplin, c. 1895. Courtesy of Interfoto Argentur